Otto Preminger | Laura / 1944

out of the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt (screenplay, based on the novel by Vera Caspary), Otto Preminger (director) Laura / 1944

 

Despite its near universal acclaim—the film has received almost a 100% rating on the internet’s Rotten Tomatoes and was chosen for inclusion in The National Film Registry—I’ve always felt that Otto Preminger’s 1944 movie Laura was a kind of creaky, if slick melodrama with an almost sickly romantic theme song, repeated over and over again until any discriminating audience member develops a headache. Each time I watch this film, I am forced to hum its sweeping/weeping strains for days on end, and for that very reason alone I have tried to steer my viewing habits away from it for years, encountering it only by accident again the other day, after watching a Turner Classics Movie repeat of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

     Speaking of Hitchcock, for a far better version of Laura, its lead equally mesmerized by a dead woman who after haunting him comes back to life, you might watch Vertigo. Much like Laura, Judy Barton/Madeline Elster is stunningly made over by the men in her life, which ends in not only a loss of identity but in her death, both symbolically and actual—the only major difference being that Laura survives her “death.” Or does she?

      Perhaps Laura is a film that, like the fine bottles of wine that Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) impeccably drinks, improves with age. For what I dismissed for most of my life, I admired this time round, at the advanced age of 67. As a youngster, I might hazard a guess, I might not have even recognized just how “creepy”—as the enthusiastic but seldom well-spoken Drew Barrymore characterized some of the film’s major figures in a chat with “The Essentials” host Robert Osbourne—the Kentucky-born gigolo Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) and his wealthy would-be mistress, Ann Treadwell (the marvelous Judith Anderson) truly are. As Treadwell makes clear to Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), Shelby, like herself, is no good—surely not the right person for the sweetly glamorous advertising executive.

    Treadwell needn’t really worry, for by that time Laura has already perceived that Shelby, the man who “before her death” she had planned to marry, is not Mr. Right. Besides, from the very moment she encounters the handsome, tough-talking cop, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) she is attracted to him and he is equally determined to win her away from the bad lot with whom she has involved herself (as McPherson tells her: “I must say, for a charming, intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.”) One might even say that, somewhat like Scottie Ferguson in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, his own neurotic, voyeuristic and necrophiliac-inspired love, has called her into being again.

     The film certainly suggests that possibility as, virtually camping out in Laura’s empty apartment and, after having read her personal diaries and letters—let alone endured the ambient theme music every time his eye (or the camera) catches a glimpse of the kitschy painted-over photograph of the high-toned dame—he falls into a kind of cheap scotch-induced sleep. At that very moment the door opens and a suddenly resurrected Laura enters her apartment!

     All right, there is still great amount of action to be played out after that. And Laura explains her absence: she has been at her country house, thinking things out. The dead woman, the plot reveals, was not Laura, but a fellow employee, Diane Redfern. Finally, McPherson hasn’t yet solved the murder!

 

   But let us imagine that in his poor confused mind, he solves the crime not in real time, but in dream time. That he has called up a seemingly real-life dame in order to get to the bottom of things, and that the rest of the film is simply a dreamscape which resolves somewhat logically—particularly given the dozens of abandoned clues and dead-ends that are never resolved—which can never entirely be sorted out. The film even clues us into that possibility when, as Laura Hunt enters the door, suddenly back from the dead, McPherson rises and rubs his eyes as if to reassure himself that he isn’t dreaming. But, obviously, the visual clue reasserts that very possibility, as does Lydecker’s own final radio broadcast, suggesting that love “reaches beyond the dark shadow of death.”

     Surely that would explain why the man who seems the most likely to have committed the crime, Shelby Carpenter—who not only illicitly meets with Redfern in Laura’s apartment, but sends her off, by insisting she answer the door, to her death—later seemingly attempts to cover up the use of Laura’s rifle and simultaneously implicates Laura herself. Likely perceiving that his relationship with the unattainable Laura is finished, he has the most reason to want to kill her—yet, suddenly, McPherson and the plot get him off the “hook,” so to speak.

     Although Ann Treadwell  has motive, she appears to be too wrapped up in herself to have plotted out such a murder—although, as she herself admits, she has certainly imagined it!

     No, the man who most irritates McPherson is the nasty, spiteful, effeminate, class-conscious snob, Waldo Lydecker, who abuses the young policeman every chance he gets, even to the point of diagnosing McPherson’s “disease,” suggesting that he should seek out a psychiatrist’s help:

 

              You'd better watch out, McPherson, or you'll finish up in a psychiatric

              ward. I doubt they've ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.

 

     Beginning with the insertion of his naked body in the very scene (demeaning McPherson even more by demanding that the cop hand him his towel and robe, as if he were a personal dresser), Lydecker has pushed his way into the cop’s life as if he, the journalist, were stalking the cop, rather than the other way around. Given Lydecker’s recognition of McPherson’s slim, attractive body (qualities for which he accuses Laura for having been smitten), it almost appears that Lydecker, himself, rather than Laura, is on the “hunt,” that despite Lydecker’s obsession with his Pygmalion-like creation Laura, it is McPherson, the dreaming/dreamy man who takes him over the edge.

      For we all know something else about Lydecker that, given the social restrictions of the day, the Hays Code, and the long centuries of bigotry that make Lydecker, if nothing else, a detestable figure: he is one of early cinema's most obvious homosexuals. Although there is no direct mention of Clifton Webb's bitchy, sissy gossip columnist as actually being a man who sleeps with other men, even before the film's shoot began, there was plenty of Hollywood hearsay about the character's queerness.

       As Vito Russo observes, even the script describing the scene showing Lydecker's apartment reads: "the camera pans the room. It is exquisite. Too exquisite for a man." The narrational voice of the dreamer Dana Andrews ponders, "You like your men less than one hundred percent, don't you, Mr. Lydecker?"

     And as Russo himself gossips, "It is widely acknowledged that director Otto Preminger had to fight to get Clifton Webb for the role because the studio brass hand labeled him a homosexual."

     The game of BB baseball that McPherson plays throughout is the only way he can steady his nerves around so many—just as Barrymore characterized them—creeps! And Lydecker, the biggest creep of them all, fits nicely into McPherson’s private solution of his Laura-come-live-again fantasy. Just as Lydecker has previously turned Laura against all her previous suitors, so now does McPherson successfully turn Laura against Lydecker, as she finally cuts off her relationship with the often priggish slanderer ("I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom," he quips.) 

   Since the savior-policeman has defeated time, like Orpheus freeing his Eurydice from death, it is utterly necessary for McPherson to destroy all remnants of present time that remain, including Lydecker’s two beloved matching grandfather clocks. He kicks in Lydecker’s home clock in search for the missing “weapon,” and, discovering the hidden entry to the pendulum machine’s lower parts of the second clock in Laura’s apartment, he ultimately uncovers the murder weapon, oddly returning it its hiding place so that he might, inexplicably, pick it up again in the morning. Like so many of his actions throughout the film, his explanation further represents his illogical behavior—the behavior of dream-time rather than sober daily police sleuthing. And in the final shootout with Lydecker that clock to is revealed as having been destroyed.

     It is almost as if he expects Lydecker’s return, much like Lydecker himself, who anticipates the cop’s return, so that they might have the symbolic “appointment” for which they were destined from the very beginning. Predictably, the shootout ends neither in Laura’s nor in McPherson’s death, but with Lydecker being killed; it is, after all, McPherson’s dream fantasy, the movie closing with the beautiful Laura clinging to him for what apparently will be for the rest of his life.

    Whether or not she truly exists, hardly matters. Having fought for her, the “dumb” cop has won, and Laura is now his (for eternity if the reality is one of his own imagination), she now able to transform him—a change he seems utterly willing to embrace—into a more civilized and sophisticated human being. Indeed, underlying the entire film and the Vera Caspary novel upon which it was based, is a struggle for self-improvement, class mobility, and social betterment. 

      If my version of this otherwise unconvincing film seems too-far-fetched, it certainly seems more plausible than studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s revision of the film’s ending, in which the entire story was revealed to have been a product of Lydecker’s imagination. Even the savvy columnist Walter Winchell admittedly could not comprehend that scenario, insisting to Zanuck that he had to change it.

     For me, it’s just as difficult to believe that Preminger’s ending represents a kind a realist playing out of events. At least, if it’s McPherson’s imaginative recreation of reality, things work out better for everyone, even if Laura simply represents the fantastical illusion of a cop who now stands on the verge of madness—the same position, after all, in which Vertigo’s cop, Scottie discovers himself in the later Hitchcock masterwork.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2014).

Jacques Rivette | Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights) / 1985

wild child

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pascal Bonitzer, Suzanne Schiffman, and Jacques Rivette (screenplay, based on one chapter from the novel by Emily Brontë), Jacques Rivette (director) Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights) / 1985

 

There often seems to be two Jacques Rivettes, one a highly innovative film-maker, the second, a far more conservative cinematographer of classics such as The Duchess of Langeasis and the movie I watched yesterday, Wuthering Heights. I like both of the director’s sides, however, and from time to time, even in his more conservative fare, we recognize the postmodern sensibility behind it.

      Shifting Emily Brontë’s 18th century tale of Yorkshire to the French Cévennes countryside of the 1930s, removes a great deal of the romanticism from the story. Yes, there are still crumbled stone walls throughout the neighborhood, but the skies are mostly sunny, as are the two blonde-haired heroes, Catherine (Febienne Bebe) and Roch (Lecas Belvaux). If Lawrence Olivier, in William Wyler’s familiar version of this tale, looked in his dark, frowning grimaces, like an older gypsy boy, the fair-haired beauty, Roch, appears to be right at home. Rather, it is Guillaume, the dark-haired drunkard, who seems out of place in this landscape. Indeed, Rivette begins his film with a dream sequence in which Guillaume appears to come out the rocks themselves, a voyeur angrily looking down upon Catherine and Roch as they kiss and play nearby. In the dream, he picks up a rock, seemingly about the hurl it upon the couple until, hearing a noise behind him, he conjures up his dead father, a figure apparently watching over the teenage boy whom he had long-ago adopted.

    In fact, it is not only their coloration, but their size, beauty, and temperament that make Catherine and Roch appear to truly be brother and sister, while Guillaume seems like an outsider. Both of the young lovers are, simply put, almost feral, wild children fighting against the confines of the hardworking and bourgeois farm life in which Guillaume would entrap them. And in these similarities, Rivette turns their love into an even more incestuous-like relationship than it is in other versions.   

     Although the servant, even in the original novel, is an important figure, one who not only observes and judges those her around, but has a role in their behavior, in Rivette she becomes, perhaps the central figure, a kind of mother and father, and for Guillaume, a hostage-wife. Hélène (earthily portrayed by Sandra Montaigu) is the one person to whom all the others can turn for help, and it is because those needs are so varied that she sometimes appears to further harm those around rather than placate them. Yet, she is the only one who can calm them, and who, at times, holds them together. Whatever little civilized behavior exists on the farm is established by her tireless actions, cooking, cleaning, listening, loving. There is hardly a moment in the film when she is not busy, while the teenagers run into nature and Guillaume falls into a drunken stupor each night.

     Obviously, all who live in this ancient stone farmhouse are outsiders, a fact which the director makes obvious when the two wild children come upon a couple of wealthy children playing tennis. It is as if, suddenly, they have witnessed a “brave new world,” which is precisely what it is: a world of wealth, leisure, and class bigotry. It is a world of traps, of pretense and lies, symbolized, in Rivette’s telling, by Catherine’s foot being immediately caught in an animal trap. One of the first lines from Madame Lindon’s mouth, as they carry the girl onto the terrace, is to command them not to lay her on the lawn chair since she will get it dirty. Roch is not even permitted to stay on the patio, but forced to leave at once.

    That Catherine, in nearly all the versions of Brontë’s tale, should be seduced by the Lindon world, is not surprising. Even if she has lived a wild life, refusing even to eat at the table in Rivette’s movie, she recognizes in the three weeks while in their care that the elegant mansion and clothes of Isabelle (Alice de Poncheville) and Olivier (Olivier Torres) represent a better life. She returns to her rustic abode with a new dress, and for the first time peers at herself in the mirror, recognizing that she is now a woman rather than a tom-boy ruff housing with her adopted brother. They may still love one another, may even, as she claims, be one another, but she cannot resist the outward appearance and manners of the Lindons.

 

    By choosing actors who are near the actual ages of the novel’s characters, Rivette helps us to more clearly comprehend the mistakes made by all the young figures of the work. Catherine cannot see through the surfaces of the new world she has encountered, while Roch cannot comprehend the pubescent changes in her that have taken place; unlike Brontë’s Heathcliff, who runs, returns, hesitates, and leaves once more, Rivette’s Roch escapes both the imprisonment of Guillaume and the rejection by Catherine simultaneously, never to truly return. For when he does return, he is no longer simply a wild child—using the name of one of Truffaut’s most notable films, L’Enfant sauvage, is intentional here; Rivette notes that his Hurlevent was difficult to make, in part, because they while shooting they were awaiting the news of Truffaut’s death—but has been transformed himself into a kind of vengeful brute. He too is now well-groomed and dressed, enough so that he attracts the attention of the now lonely Isabelle. And Catherine may be still attracted to him, particularly since it is clear in Rivette’s version that Olivier and Catherine do not have a serious sexual relationship; but she too has been domesticated, and will not even think of leaving Olivier, forbidding Isabelle to see Roch.

      It may be, in part, jealousy that leads Catherine to insist that her sister-in-law stay away from Roch; but she is also perceptive in that Roch is now a cruel manipulator who does not only destroy his brother Guillaume, but will brutalize and rape Catherine’s sister-in-law out of revenge. In his new mien he has become like the Lindon’s, something beautiful on the outside, but rotten within.

      Between the extremes, once more, Catherine is trapped, caught up in a rivalry that does really concern itself with whom she truly is. Perhaps by setting his Hurlevent in the 1930s, Rivette is hinting at the dark whirling winds rising throughout Europe which would destroy nearly anything that truly was good. Rivette’s Roch has so changed, in fact, that he cannot actually return to Catherine’s bedside, the way Hearthcliff does. Rivette calls him in up in Catherine’s dying imagination in a dream, and at the sight of him, she dies. Roch is now part of the brewing storm, just as, in their class and social bigotries, is Olivier, the two women in their lives having been destroyed.

      In an interview with Rivette, film writer Valérie Hazette decried the fact that the director did not continue with the later sections of the novel. To do so, however, would have robbed him of his theme. Roch is already dead when Catherine dies in Rivette’s telling. No longer a “wild child,” he is now an uncontrollable beast for whom not even her memory can bring redemption.

 

Los Angeles, March 9, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2014).

Andrew Haigh | Greek Pete / 2009

best escort of the year

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Haigh (director) Greek Pete / 2009 [documentary]

Greek Pete (or Peter Pittaros) is a London rent boy who during the making of this film was chosen as the most outstanding escort in the world. It’s not that Pete is so stunningly handsome, although he apparently is well-endowed. But his charm lies in his personality, a man who in Andrew Haigh’s first film reveals himself to have almost an indomitable sense of life. He recognizes what he is doing will seem strange and even disgusting to many (he still keeps it secret from his father), but for him it’s simply a job, like an accountant, a baker, a lawyer, and he intends to be the best at his job as anyone else might try to be in their profession. He succeeds by actually talking with his clients and pretty much giving them whatever sexual pleasures they desire, even though some of them are quite kinky. The only thing we won’t do, apparently, although he even leaves that open to question, is to be fucked bareback or even fuck others without a condom. And he knows the limits and is forceful enough, and perhaps strong enough to enforce them. Unlike most rent boys, moreover, Pete identifies totally as a gay man, admitting that he loves sex.

      His faith in life and his utter belief in people is reiterated through Haigh’s documentary film—shot over about a year—radiates in nearly every frame. We see him engaged in sex, simply talking to clients, participating in nude shoots, and talking directly to the camera; but mostly we watch him in the home he has apartment he has rented in Convent Park where various other prostitutes, male and female gather to talk, celebrate holidays, and just hang out. There we also meet Pete’s lover Kai (Lewis Wallis), and other figures who go under such monikers as Barbara Bush (Tristan Field), Hotblond84 (Liam Thompsoon), Fitfuck86 (Barry Robinson), Youngandcuteland (Robert Day) and Tightass91 (Steve Turner).  

 

   Together they talk about the difficult and dangerous times they’ve had—several of them have been raped (which even they describe as a strange phenomenon for someone who has openly elicited sexual contact), beaten, and forced to do strange activities far beyond S&M activity, hot wax and piss; one describes having fucked a man who then asked him to come in and fuck his wife—share a full Christmas meal, and get drunk. But the dark turn in all of this is the drugs. Although Pete is clearly into cocaine, the younger kids around him are far deeper into drugs and can’t control their appetite, almost all the money they earn going into the purchase of more drugs. Pete on the other hand is saving up to live a good life, a house he can fill with objects, maybe art and books, although not apparent that growing up in a small apartment in which his brother and he slept in the living room that he has ever been to a museum or even read a book. But Pete is a dreamer and despairs for Kai’s inability to keep busy, work the streets, and save for the future. Pete, it appears, is also somewhat of a pragmatist knowing that although he’s been in the business for only two years, he doesn’t have a long while left.

      Indeed, when he returns from Los Angeles after winning the international award for the best escort, he seems to have lost contact with most of his friends and clients, making calls to report he’s back and any time they want to meet up, he’ll be available. He finds Kai, who he’s finally thrown out of his apartment, asleep in his bed, so dead on drugs that he doesn’t even awaken too Pete’s touch. The ultimate emptiness of it all, including somehow Haigh’s somewhat celebratory film, is brought home with the sudden silence. What does it even mean to others that Pete is now the best escort of the year? Pete sits proudly, award in hand, with no one to share the news.

      One imagines he might have another year, maybe a few months or so but what will he do when the two-hour encounters for 200 quid disappear and the drugs have finally taken hold?

      Still, I’d love to meet up with Greek Pete, a charmingly cute boy, with an open grin and enough moxie to force the cynical person smile. By the end of the film, even his face seemed more beautiful given the infectious smile he posts to the world.  

      If Haigh’s first film is a little rough-hewn he would go on to direct some of the most powerful films both about gay and heterosexual relationships, Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2015), Lean on Pete (2017), and most recently, All of Us Strangers (2023), all of which have had critical and some financial success.

 

Los Angeles, July 30, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2023).

Wong Kar-wai | 春光乍洩 Happy Together / 1997

the falls

by Douglas Messerli

Wong Kar-wai (screenplay and direction) 春光乍洩 Happy Together / 1997

 In Wong Kar-wai’s English mistitled film—in the original Mandarin Chinese the title suggests something “indecent”—the likeable gay couple, Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung), are clearly mismatched. Together they have traveled from their home in Hong Kong to Argentina in an attempt to renew their relationship, both trapped in a pattern of abuse and “starting over.” Traveling in a beat-up automobile, the two get lost, argue, get lost again, and finally part. The more stable of the two, Lai, who would like to maintain the relationship, copes by finding a low-paying job as a kind of barker for a local tango club.

      Even though Ho nightly picks up tricks, he still, clearly, is determined to hurt Lai, often bringing his lovers into the club. Living in a small room, Lai tries to get over his feelings for Ho, but is clearly suffering. When Ho shows up one night having been severely beaten by one of his clients, Lai takes his former lover to the hospital and allows him back into his life so that he can care for him. Although Lai, at first, refuses to share a bed, he gradually falls back into the pattern of lover, nursing and feeding Lai who with bandaged hands can do little for himself. And for a short period, we are later told in a voiceover, the two again become “happy together.”

 

     But as Ho begins to heal, so too does he return to his destructive ways, going out each night while leaving his almost saintly companion in utter loneliness. Lai changes jobs, working in a restaurant, where he meets a young man from Taiwan, Chang, who is almost the opposite of Ho. Undemanding, caring and friendly, Chang has the gift of listening: he hears voices from across the room and can tell through the tones of the words he hears the inner condition of the speakers, forcing Lai and the audience to recognize the sadness betrayed by Lai’s voice.

      Indeed, there is something increasingly despairing about Wong’s film, as Lai begins to drink more heavily and like Ho starts to pick of men in public places, in fact running into Ho himself in one of the public bathrooms. Although a close friendship develops between Chang and him, and it is suggested that Chang may be gay, the two do not sexually link up, and, ultimately, Chang moves on in his own search for meaning by traveling to the Antipodes of Asia to the tip of Argentina where there is a lighthouse where, legend has it, all sorrows can be left behind.

      Ho tries to return, to “start over” once again, but this time Lai does not accept him, as he moves on to yet another job, as a butcher, which pays better. In another voice over, we are told that Lai has stolen from his father’s business partners in order to finance his and Ho’s trip, and he now becomes determined to return to Hong Kong and, eventually, pay off his debt.

      But before he leaves Argentina, he must also visit a place of natural beauty that may bring him some resolution. Throughout the journey, both he and Ho have been determined to visit the famed Iguazu waterfalls depicted in a small magic-lit lamp they carry with them. In a long short of the towering falls we see all the perils and power of the two men’s relationship played out in natural imagery, a scene which certainly does bring this movie to a kind of closure.

 

    In what appears almost as an appendix, we see Ho in Taiwan, about to return to Hong Kong. In the night market of Taipei, he visits a noodle stand run by Chang’s loving parents, stealing a photograph hanging upon the wall of Chang posing at the end of the Southern continent. The movie closes with the Turtles’ Hit of the 1967, “Happy Together.” But the lyrics, in this context seem highly ironic. Do they refer to the brief period when Lai was nursing Ho? To his undisclosed love of Chang? Or is the director speaking through metaphors about the soon to be “handover” (the same year of this movie) of Hong Kong to China, obviously a relationship that was also fraught with tension?

      

   

     In a sense the ambiguousness of this ending is something that plagues Wong’s film throughout. In the seemingly indiscriminate changes from black and white to color, in its sudden shifts from realist landscape to a blurring of city images, in its quick-time speed up of the Buenos Aires streets, and in its general narrative laxness, the director seems not quite sure whether he wants to tell a somewhat poignant and painful story of a failed relationship of two gay lovers or whether he wants to push his work into more metaphoric territory. Perhaps he is suggesting that the love that both of these men are seeking, the happiness of “being together,” is destroyed as it falls, like the great Iguazu, into the turbulence of living itself. While Happy Together, accordingly, often seems like a powerfully nuanced film, a sort of triste-induced “last tango,” in the end it leaves one with a sense of a void, of profound emptiness, with a grand inertia of being, finally, unable to “start over” once again. But oh what beautiful images Wong presents us along the way!

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April 2014).